Reviews of In the Evening of No Warning
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"From its beautifully poised title piece to its powerful concluding meditation on ‘Granting the Wolf,’ Kevin Clark’s haunted and haunting In the Evening of No Warning is by turns celebratory, sardonic, and elegiac. Clark is a deeply thoughtful poet whose narrative gift is always enhanced by a searching and restless consciousness; his melodies are limber, his language scrupulous and urgent. This new book, his first full-length collection, offers ambitious analyses of the ways love and death disrupt quotidian realities as ‘dusk calls,’ saying, ‘before you write, know me.’”

—Sandra M. Gilbert

“Kevin Clark’s new volume of poetry, In the Evening of No Warning, wears the anxious velvet mantle of Time gone magical with sleights of hand. What vanishes is us. Yet, the very passing itself, musical with its children’s hour, becomes the unthinkable and sublime refuge that all the local nostalgias gather about. Many of these poems are altogether sweet and perfect. This is a wonderful book.”

—Norman Dubie

“Kevin Clark’s poetry understands the limits of eros by experiencing those limits openly and thoroughly . . . And he understands passion for what it is, polymorphous, heartstrong and headdriven, not idea finally or ever, but protean force, to be ridden and ridden out and ridden again. Somehow this ecstatic poetry stops short of oblivion, accepts its margins, and seeks out the lovely surviving presences of marriage and family. I love this book for the flash and patience of its intelligence, but I learn what love is by the unique human occasion of it.”

—William Olsen

"In the Evening of No Warning takes risks born of a passion for poetry to do what no poem can: to reclaim us from loss; to restore ourselves as whole, at home in time, loved, and loving. The result is sometimes somber, sometimes exhilarating. From the very opening ("Our Children Playing Catch in the Evening of No Warning"), it reminds us that life is always risky business, all the more for a middle-aged man with wife and kids who has "given hostages to fortune," yet who still burns with the memory of past lives—and who gathers fitful hints of another, more radiant life just beyond us."

—Stan Sanvel Rubin, Water-Stone, Fall 2002